Why are the Tories getting into bed with the proteges of porn barons?
by Richard Pendlebury
Party bigwigs wanted Brady as London mayor ‘How sad that politics is all about money’
LORD LONGFORD’S 1972 ‘commission’ to examine pornography and its effect on society is most remembered, if at all, for the elderly Christian’s visit to a live sex show in Copenhagen, during which he was handed a whip and invited to a beat a naked woman, who turned out to be a man (Longford declined).
Yet most of the material that appeared in t he 500- page Longford Report was gathered in the then heartland of the preinternet British porn industry: seedy back offices and dingy clubs in London where the seedy men — always men — who ran furtive empires held court.
Two of his lordship’s interviews still resonate today. That is because their subjects — then relative novices in the sex business — have since become among t he ri c hest men in Britain, wielding considerable power and influence.
A decade after being grilled by Longford, David Gold and David Sullivan joined forces. They have been major players in the smut game for more than 30 years. And while their portfolios are still devoted to naked females or the sexual act in its many forms, they have also diversified into ‘legit’ business, owning national newspapers, property, planes and the Premier League football club which will soon call the London 2012 Olympic Stadium its home.
It is unlikely the two Davids will ever cease to be described as ‘pornographers’ or shake off the distaste that goes with the appellation. Sullivan has even served time in jail for living off immoral earnings, while Gold once seemed a permanent fixture in the Old Bailey dock.
But 30 years after Sullivan was slopping out in the Scrubs, their female lieutenants are welcome in what once would have been the most unlikely of places.
Last week, as the first shots were fired in the campaign for May’s General Election, the two most senior women in the Sullivan-Gold empire were to be found sitting in the front row at the media launch of the Tory Party’s attack on Labour Party spending plans.
Gazing up at Chancellor George Osborne, Home Secretary Theresa May and other Cabinet members, was Jacqueline Gold, chief executive of the Ann Summers chain of sex shops, which her father, David Gold, had bought out of receivership in the year of the Longford Report, and which she turned into a success story.
Sitting nearby was Karren Brady, vice - chairman of the Sullivan- Gold co- owned West Ham United football club.
It was Sullivan, one of Britain’s l eading pornographers, who mentored the young Brady — the convent-educated daughter of a self-made North London millionaire — and is in many ways behind almost all of her success.
He plucked her from LBC radio, where she earned a crust selling advertising space. By the age of 20, she had been made a director of the pair’s ‘ boobs and bums’ premium sex lines, and space-aliens-filled Sport Newspapers.
By 25, she was boss of their first football club, Birmingham City. A teenage Thatcherite and longtime Tory Party member, she is now a much-favoured protege of the Cameron regime.
As the party’s small business ambassador, it was Brady, now 45, who i ntroduced Chancellor Osborne’s keynote speech at the 2013 conference with the words: ‘The right man with the right plan.’
Before she was made a Tory life peer last September the party moguls tried hard to persuade her to stand as their candidate in the next London mayoral elections. Earlier this week, Osborne was the guest speaker at the secretive Thirty Club, which meets monthly at Claridges.
Brady ruffled feathers by asking a notably sycophantic question about how guests — advertising executives in the main — could help the Chancel lo r wi n re-election.
Since becoming a director at West Ham, Brady has lived in a rented house in Chelsea from Monday to Thursday, returning to the family’s £1 million home near Solihull for weekends with her husband, exfootballer Paul Peschisolido, and their two teenage children.
But what are the Tory faithful, not to mention upstanding voters, supposed to make of Osborne’s decision to align his party to a woman who is closely associated with some of the most high-profile pornographers of our times? The Chancellor hasn’t said.
Though she is comfortably off, Brady’s net worth is believed to be far short of the £75 million that has been reported.
The same could not be said of her fellow Tory Jacqueline Gold, who is said to be worth close to a quarter of a billion pounds.
Her appearance in the front row of hand- picked, high- profile Conservative supporters was more unexpected — but apparently very exciting for Tory Central office.
Using terminology that was more Soho than Westminster, a senior aide explained last night: ‘People who say the Conservative Party is all fur coat and no knickers have seen the opposite now.’
While I was still trying to understand exactly what he meant by this, he added, more soberly: ‘Jacqueline Gold is a Tory businesswomen with a high profile, and we would like to do more with her if she would like to.’
Mr Cameron has in the recent past been accused of having a ‘woman problem’. In 2011, during PMQs he told Labour MP Angela Eagle to ‘calm down, dear’ as he stood before his all-male, largely public- school- educated government front bench.
This patronising remark may have had some bearing on the results of a widely reported Mumsnet survey which suggested that many female voters thought him too ‘posh and out of touch’.
Even now there are only five women in the 22-strong Cabinet, the same number as in 2011, even though two were brought in at the expense of male colleagues last summer.
Whether Jacqueline Gold is the answer to this particular conundrum remains to be seen. Not everyone is quite so thrilled at the prospect of her being the Tories’ latest attempt to bolster its ranks with prominent females.
Former Cabinet minister Ann Widdecombe, an example of a certain kind of Tory womanhood from a very different era, was particularly sniffy about Central Office’s enthusiasm for Ms Gold, 54, who boasts of selling 2.5 million vibrators a year and said in a recent interview that she most wanted to be remembered among other things ‘ for l i berating women between the sheets, for bringing sex to the High Street’.
One imagines Ms Widdecombe has no desire to be liberated between the sheets.
She said last night: ‘It is so sad that modern politics is all about money, no matter how tawdry the source.
‘Yet again, Cameron is pursuing what he regards as “modern” without any thought as to how his long-standing, hard-working supporters will view the matter.’
It is unlikely Mr Cameron will lose any sleep over Ms Widdecombe’s remarks about what might be called the pornification of the Tories, still less Ms Gold or indeed her father and his longtime business partner Sullivan.
The rise of these porn brothersin-arms began in the permissive Sixties, when society attitudes were fast changing and the laws which touched on public morality were unable to keep up.
The son of an RAF serviceman, David Sullivan spent his early childhood in Wales before the family moved to urban Essex. There, the short, pudgy youth excelled at school and won a place to read economics at Queen Mary’s College, London.
On graduating in 1970, he used t hat economic expertise to identify and exploit a lucrative business opportunity: flogging smutty photographs.
With a fellow graduate and £70 he hired a photographic studio and a willing female model. From a lock-up in the East End, he began sending soft-core pictures i n plain envelopes to paying customers all over Europe.
That is when Lord Longford caught up with him.
Sullivan, who dismissed the peer’s subsequent report as amateurish and flawed, claimed t hat clergymen, aristocrats, university professors and headmasters were among his 30,000 satisfied clients.
In his heyday, Sullivan owned 139 sex shops, 20 magazines, 40 race horses and a number of
‘I’m sure that Tory voters have sex, too’
massage parlours. He launched an unusually explicit magazine called Whitehouse, to annoy the eponymous anti-sleaze campaigner Mary.
Sullivan boasted that the material he peddled was ‘the strongest legally available’ in the UK, while arguing: ‘ Ours is a perfectly normal business run by ordinary, nice people.’
But the police smut squad was constantly at his heels and, in the spring of 1982, the ‘Prince of Porn’ was tried at Snaresbrook Crown Court on charges of l i ving off immoral earnings: in other words of being a pimp.
The alleged offences related to his two London massage parlours, where undercover policemen were offered sexual ‘extras’ by the ‘underpaid and exploited’ female staff. The court heard that Sullivan was Britain’s highest-paid company chairman, with annual salary and pensions contributions of more than £750,000.
His business had an annual turnover of £10 million, which paid for a black-suede-furnished mansion in Essex. His massage girls were offering ‘French and Continental’ — as sexual services were euphemistically termed — for £20.
Sullivan denied the charges but was found guilty and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. He served 71 days in Wormwood Scrubs and Ford Open Prison, where he spent much of his time musing on new business models.
Shortly after his release, he merged his i nterests with two brothers from the East End who were also major figures in the porn trade. Sullivan said of his link-up with David and Ralph Gold: ‘Better to own half a cake that is making money than a whole cake that isn’t. So we got together and agreed on a joint venture.’
In 1971, David Gold and his company had been cleared at the Old Bailey for publishing obscene materials for gain.
He was in the Central Criminal Court again in 1975, to defend himself in relation to 11,000 seized magazines dealing with bondage and flagellation. Gold was cleared once again, as he was in another obscenity case the following year.
These, then, are the men who did so much to mould the fortunes of Karren Brady and Jacqueline Gold.
As the years passed, Sullivan and Gold came to the conclusion that they would have less trouble with the police if they diversified.
In 1986, the Sunday Sport newspaper was launched. The pair also bought and sold Birmingham City football club, before taking over West Ham.
Many supporters of that famous old club were dismayed by the arrival of two porn merchants. That antipathy has been softened by an upsurge in form; winning is everything in football, as in politics.
Which is why, it seems, the Tories are so keen on glamorous Ms Gold.
She entered her father’s business aged 21 and took over the then fourshop Ann Summers chain, which she ‘feminised’ and took from the side street to the High Street.
Along the way, she acquired the Knickerbox underwear chain and brought the hugely successful Rampant Rabbit brand of sex toy to the UK.
According to her website, Ann Summers has a turnover of £150 million, 145 stores in the British Isles and holds more than 4,000 sex toy parties every week.
For these endeavours Ms Gold, 54, has been acclaimed as Retail Week’s ‘Most Powerful Woman in Business’, and Barclays Bank’s Most Inspirational ‘Businesswoman in the UK’.
Her private life, though blameless, has been far from smooth.
Her parents split when she was a child. Her first marriage, at 20, lasted a decade. Aged 40, she met a City trader called Dan Cunningham who is 17 years her junior. After three failed IVF attempts they split up in 2006. But having met again at a party two years l ater, they resumed the relationship and another IVF attempt produced a twin boy and girl in 2009.
Their son had a brain condition and died eight months later. His parents married soon after their loss, with Karren Brady at the wedding.
Now both women are i n the political front line.
Today, Baroness Brady and Ms Gold (and who will bet against her, too, receiving a Tory peerage soon?) are widely viewed as tough and competent businesswomen who have made it in a very male environment — much like politics.
Others, like Ann Widdecombe, might say that they are the acceptable faces of a very sleazy empire which was built on exploitation of their own sex.
This week Ms Gold said of such criticisms: ‘I’m sure Tory voters have sex as well. Times have changed, and in terms of our embarrassment over talking about it, I think things are improving.’
She added: ‘ I’m not officially advising the Tories at this stage, and I’m not looking for a political title, but I think that with my experience in business, particularly as a woman who employs 10,000 other women, I can help.’
David Cameron needs help. After all, he does have a ‘woman problem’. So Ms Gold has become the ‘ knicker seller’ — as she was described to me by one Tory aide — who doubles as a political fig leaf.